A friend of presidents, industrialists, and statesmen… A sailor whose career began on coal fired steamships but went on to witness the surrender of Japan following the use of the first atomic bomb… A pilot who became the first man to fly over the North and South Poles, and an admiral who charted a landmass fully half the size of the United States itself… Admiral Richard E. Byrd was one of the world’s last great explorers.
The air war in Korea is often remembered for the first jet on jet combats and the dreaded “MiG alley.” But a far less remembered part of the air war, before a MiG entered the fray, represented a key, if almost completely overlooked, moment in one of the hottest times of the Cold War.